Your Right to Know

By the end of an extraordinary and exhaustive 107-minute news conference, Chris Christie had
transformed himself from a belligerent chief executive, famed for ridiculing his detractors, into a
deeply wronged father figure, shaking his head, whispering his words and verging on tears.

The bravado had vanished. The certitude was gone.

In its place was an entirely new vocabulary of self-doubt and a once-unthinkable spectacle:
Christie acknowledging a “crisis of confidence,” sleepless nights, second-guessing and nonstop
soul-searching.

Political apologies generally follow a robotic sequence. The public figure caught doing wrong
offers a terse, often-grudging, sometimes-distant and always-uncomfortable expression of
remorse.

But Christie is not every other politician. He said “sorry” the Christie way: excessively,
vaingloriously, in large, vivid and personal terms.

At times, he divulged oddly intimate details and reactions: the 8 a.m. home workout session
after which he discovered the “heartbreaking” news of his aide’s misconduct, and his late-night
chats about the episode with his wife.

He seemed to want to talk the scandal away, droning on for so long at the Statehouse that
reporters repeated their inquiries, even asking for his response to a news story that had popped up
as he was talking.

“What was on display,” said Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican consultant who has advised former
Gov. Mitt Romney, “were all the strengths of Chris Christie and all of the weaknesses.”

“He just does not come in small doses,” Murphy said.

Christie fielded every query tossed his way yesterday (more than 90), but there remained scores
of unanswered questions about his involvement in the imbroglio, which his forceful performance did
little to satisfy.

Even as they marveled at his stamina, Republican leaders privately worried that Christie was
cementing a reputation for the most-unwelcome quality in the world of political professionals:
unpredictability.

There were moments when the straight-talking governor seemed to slip into self-denial. Despite
the lack of concrete evidence, he suggested that perhaps a traffic study really had been in
progress when an aide in his office, working with a Christie appointee, closed lanes and paralyzed
traffic in Fort Lee, N.J.

Mostly, he kept apologizing. Twenty times, in all. To the people of New Jersey. To the mayor of
Fort Lee. To members of the state Legislature. Even to the news media. He kept finding new ways to
flagellate himself, ticking off his “mistakes,” owning up to his “failure” and repeatedly
declaring, “I was wrong.”

But this version of Chris Christie — the chastened, penitent public official — was hard to keep
up, and he occasionally lapsed into a familiar pique.

When out-of-town reporters began to shout questions at him, disrupting his system of calling on
journalists, the governor shot them a chilly stare. “Guys,” he said, “we don’t work that way.”

And his temper flared when he denounced, in harsh and scolding terms, the senior staff member
who sent the email proposing “some traffic problems in Fort Lee” and who, he said, later misled him
about her role. “I am stunned by the abject stupidity that was shown here,” he said.